Usually, when I remembered something from the past so vividly, it was for a reason. There was almost always something that instigated the memory. I had to wonder, Why did I remember that particular memory? Was it because of the dogs?

They seemed so innocent at the time, and yet I remembered what they would do later that winter. I also remembered what I had done afterwards. That incident had broken something inside of me. It also left something behind, a dark shadow that lingered on inside my soul. Or did it have something to do with the ear infections? I doubted that, however.

If I had to guess, I would say it had something to do with the Roe v. Wade news broadcast. Even though it was almost incidental to the flashback, that court decision definitely had a huge impact on my life. That brought up more questions though. Did it have something to do with the multiple abortions my mother had, or the one that my daughter had?

I stood outside of my childhood home in silence, trying to make sense of my thoughts. The Oracle had given my mother’s book of poems to the Keeper, who passed it to me. With it, I could heal my granddaughter. Despite what my ex-wife had told me, I still considered her my granddaughter. Even if I didn’t think that way, she was still related to me by blood.

Everything seemed connected, yet I couldn’t trace the threads clearly. I needed to ask the Oracle how she obtained the book. Maybe she could also help me understand how to heal the baby’s soul with the book of poems.

As for the reason I had returned to my childhood home, I had no idea why. I had only visited the house a few times after I found myself in Acedia. Standing outside the house, I found it almost unrecognizable. I could feel the tug of memories, but I easily brushed aside their clammy grasp as I wandered around the estate.

The pool had been filled in with trash, which had been partially burnt. Obviously, someone had dumped a lot of junk into the empty pool and used it like a burn pile. Every time I saw the house, I got depressed. My sister had died because of the pool, but I still hated the fact that it had been trashed. I wished that they had either done nothing to it or gotten rid of it completely.

The tree fort above the sandbox was long gone. I remembered playing with my toy soldiers in the sandbox, but that had disappeared with the tree fort. I had almost completely forgotten that I used to create elaborate battles there with an army of toy soldiers. That thought prompted another memory, one where I played with my toy soldiers whenever I went to my mother’s home every other weekend for a couple of years until she died.

I half-expected to see the old guest house off to the side, but that had disappeared too. Even the barn in the back pasture had long since been torn down. My grandmother’s vegetable garden had been swallowed by the overgrown lawn. The whole place looked like it should be condemned and torn down.

Sighing, I closed my eyes for a moment. Most of my childhood memories were because of the estate. Some of them were even good. It was hard to believe that no one had lived in the house for years. I wondered, How could someone let such an expensive home waste away? Could no one afford it?

When I was a kid, I would carry out my golf bag to the front yard where I would hit golf balls. Sometimes, I would hit near the tree fort and pretend the sandbox was a sand trap. The pool in the backyard was a water hazard.

The outside told one story, but when I stepped inside, the truth hit me even harder. The decay and damage was worse than I remembered. Cooper thieves had torn apart the walls and floors in search of any metal that they could sell. Drug addicts had apparently squatted in the house. I could see needles and syringes scattered along with the trash that covered the floor.

I walked through the house. Occasionally, memories would bubble up. One was the memory of my grandmother telling me that I used to pretend to be drowning. The reason I did it was because I wanted to get my grandfather to jump into the pool to save me. Sometimes I wondered if she was lying to me. I couldn’t think of one single good memory that involved him except when I used his electronic voice box to sound like a robot. Not having emotions always appealed to me.

Then again, I didn't have many good memories of my father either. One of them was teaching me how to shoot. The other was when he taught me how to place bets on horse races with his bookie. When I was in second grade, I remembered getting into trouble when I took my handheld transistor radio to school so that I could listen to the results of the races.

Although I no longer cared about horses, I used to care about them a lot. With the exception of swimming in the pool, my favorite pastime was riding our horses. Even before I had a horse of my own, my grandmother had installed one of those rocking horses in concrete outside. At first, it had been white, but it gradually changed to a yellowish pale green color.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

When my grandmother bought a horse for me like the rest of my family, I named the blue roan Mara since she was a mare. My grandfather’s horse was a white gelding named Ludovic. My grandmother's red mare horse was named Bellona. As for my father’s horse, he had a black stallion named Midnight. My sister and mother had their own horses, but that was at my mother’s grandparent’s ranch. She definitely wasn’t willing to pay for their upkeep herself.

It felt surreal, thinking back on the freedom I had as a child. I couldn’t imagine any parent allowing their child to roam the woods alone. Much less carrying a loaded rifle with a pocket full of bullets. In fact, it sounded criminal.

Another memory was of sneaking into my grandmother’s room at night. I would creep out of the guest house and into the main manor. Then I would go to her bedroom and crawl to her side of the bed and tug on her nightgown. She would wake up without a single complaint. Then she would slip out of bed quietly and follow me to the kitchen. There, she would cut up some potatoes and bake them for me, even though my grandfather hated her doing it. It was like our little secret.

Soon, I found myself in the old office where my grandmother had kept house plans. Occasionally, after school, she would take me around town and show me some of the houses she’d built. Other times, I would sit in the corner of her office coloring a Batman coloring book underneath a wooden bald eagle with the American flag while she worked.

Briefly, I wondered if I had chosen to come here because it was one of the safest places where I could hide out as a child. I could avoid my father and grandfather by staying inside the room. My grandmother even bought a little desk to put in the corner for me to work at as a child.

Sighing, I sat down and opened my mother’s book of poems. Her father had given her a writing journal as a teenager. She kept the book and wrote poems in it her entire life. At least, that was what she had told me. She occasionally read some of the poems to me and asked my opinion.

She had never let me read the book myself, though. In fact, I had never even seen the interior of the book. The handwriting was neatly written cursive, which annoyed me. I hated cursive. Something about cursive bothered me.

I found the poems I had expected. However, I also found out that my mother had written down her personal thoughts as well. In fact, it was a little more personal than I was comfortable with. I flipped through the pages and noticed that she hadn’t actually written all that much. It looked like she had only written something when she was inspired, upset, or simply needed to put her thoughts on paper so that she could sort them out.

I started to read, and her unhappiness poured out. Her parents were strict, running their household like the ranch they lived on. Every day, she had to help with the endless chores. However, she was never rewarded for her hard work. She wasn’t paid since her parents just expected her to contribute to the ranch.

Despite this, she never complained, at least out loud. This silence didn’t extend to her writing. In the journal, her resentment simmered and boiled over. There were even a few poems that were quite eye opening. Besides the angry poems, there were a few hopeful ones, mostly based on the day that she would turn eighteen.

She wrote about how, on the day she turned eighteen, she left home without looking back. That was the day she finally felt free. She found a job working long hours for low pay. However, she was happy since the money she earned was hers.

However, all those years of going without had left their mark. Even though she finally had her own income, she struggled to spend it. Saving became her habit, her obsession. Every dollar she earned went into a savings account that rarely saw any withdrawals. The only reason I knew this was because she kept some pages where she recorded how much she was able to save each time she got a paycheck.

Then she met my father. She wrote about him like he was the answer to all her struggles. He was a rich, handsome boy who whisked her away from the monotony of hard work and gave her a taste of freedom she had never experienced. They fell in love fast much like every typical whirlwind romance. At first, everything was wonderful and they soon got married. A few months later, my sister was born.

Unfortunately, life after that wasn’t what she had imagined. My father started to change once the reality of supporting a family set in. He resented not being able to live the life he wanted and started pushing her away. She, on the other hand, ignored him and concentrated on her job and on my sister. This unhappy situation continued for years.

As I read her words, it hit me just how much I hadn’t known about my mother, or my father. However, what I read next made me shiver because I did recognize my grandfather. The weight of my mother’s words pulled me deeper into the shadows of her life. Her writing didn’t say it outright, but there were hints and suggestions about my grandfather that made my skin crawl. The way she described their interactions was disturbing.

At first, she was able to ignore his subtle flirtations when she took my sister Lyssa to my grandparent’s house to spend time with my grandmother. My grandmother had helped them a lot over the years. However, one time, something more happened. She didn’t say exactly what occurred, but it was clear that something had happened between them one day when she was swimming in the pool while my grandmother played with Lyssa.

She didn’t detail exactly what he did, only that it was the last time she would ever set foot in that house. "I will never return," she wrote, her anger and fear palpable through the ink. "I will never meet him again." The words were heavy and final, but I knew it wasn’t final since my earliest memories were about my grandparents and their pool.